Students who don´t prepare their homework

 How to convince them of the importance of doing it?

Mistakes are a great way to start talking about homework, since they are, besides the famous excuses like “I´ve been working too much”, “I didn´t have time”, or even “Something strange happened to my computer”, one of the greatest justifications they are used to using when asking us not to “click on ‘undone’”. Fears they bring from their lives, their study background (due to unprepared and repressor teachers) and other personal experiences – obviously, here, taking into consideration the adult students, can interfere specially when it´s time to be called to answer or to interact with others in class.

When you refer to mistakes not as a fail, but a profit from which they can take an enormous advantage, they start seeing homework – and to this, I would also include class participation, with a different mindset. Of course, we are not psychologists, and will never be able to delete fears have been feeding for years. But, in our specific educational environment, we can help them to overcome in some way these fears, and provide them with quality and responsibility.

Other important tool to be used is Wise up Online. As mentioned in the video but we are already aware of, is that some students usually (try to) prepare classes, for example, during the shuttle to the school, seated in the waiting room, few minutes before the class starts.

If we reinforce the idea of preparing homework watching the Wise up Online, with an good English-English online dictionary (I always talk about Mc Millan Online Dicionary) taking advantage of having the episodes, the book opened, inside a proper, comfortable and silent environment, we can push them further into the direction of preparing classes in a profitable and proper way. We have to convince them that they need silence and focus to prepare a good class. Preparing classes inside a bus or a train, or even a car, will be considered for the purposes of the Assessement Charts, and their development will be in danger.

Students who prepare classes, have the opportunity (and time) to know more new things. When the homework is prepared, teachers have time to work with other ways to get to the goal of the class.

As we know, and we have to say to the students, Wise up methodology is thought as a whole and big system or, as the teacher of the video said, a “box”, and preparing classes is an important part of this engine. If it fails, their performance probably will do as well.